


what once was

by Quixcy



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Drabbles, F/M, Falling In Love, First Kiss, First Love, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Humor, Fluffy, Gen, Light Angst, Love Confessions, M/M, One-Shots, Sweet, i really adore these boys, like pronto, slow-burn, someone needs to hug reggie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:54:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27413047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quixcy/pseuds/Quixcy
Summary: Sometimes you come back to life, slowly. Moment by moment.Short one-shots as Julie and the boys find themselves dealing with past phantoms and future questions, between snuggles and affirming words, and learn that they can do anything -- anything -- together.
Relationships: Julie Molina/Luke Patterson
Comments: 19
Kudos: 212





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone! I'm doing a new series of one-shots, the first one featuring Luke x Julie. I needed a distraction from the election so of COURSE I opted to write some fluff.
> 
> Enjoy!

_somewhere you belong_

“What kind of homework is that again?” Luke asks, coming to sit on the edge of the bed where Julie lay, chewing on her the tip of her pencil.

She doesn’t even glance up. “Trig.”

“Oh.” He pauses. “Alex could help with that—probably.”

“Nah.” She writes down an answer from her calculator and goes to the next problem. Her homework looks like a foreign language to him. “I should be okay. Though—” and she turns a sharp glare up at him “—what have I told you about my room?”

“It’s . . . off . . . limits?”

“So you _do_ remember.”

He slides off the bed to kneel beside it and presses his palms together in prayer. “Sorry but _please_ let me stay up here. I’m going absolute bananas sitting in that studio all the time.”

She quirks an eyebrow. “You can go walk around.”

“I know.”

“So . . .”

He glances away, sinking back onto his feet to sit on them. “Nothing’s the same. I-I mean I recognize most of the street names but—” He abruptly stops, like he always does when a new idea grabs his attention. “There was this taco place, right? Right on the Boulevard. Had the best ones around. The boys and I used to go there all the time before we hit the clubs or played gigs. It was like a second home, yeah? And now it’s—it’s a _bookstore_.”

“Don’t knock a good bookstore,” she warns.

He puts his hands up in defeat. “I’m not! But it’s not just a bookstore. It’s like a whole strip mall.”

Julie sets down her pencil, trying to figure out exactly where he means. Right on the Boulevard . . . ? “You mean The Grove?”

“That what it’s called?”

“Yeah. Flynn and I go there some weekends. It’s fun. We saw Leigh Bardugo there one year.”

“Who?”

Julie points to her bookshelves, to the books with BARDUGO on the spine. There are six in total, and he nods although it’s pretty clear that he knows absolutely nothing about it.

“Oooh, rad! I’ll have to check her out.”

“You read much?”

“I mean—yeah, I used to,” he shrugs and shifts so he leaned back against her bed, facing away from her. He doesn’t make an indention in the covers, and he doesn’t cast a shadow. Things that remind her that he isn’t real. No matter if they _had_ touched for a few moments in the studio last week. They haven’t been able to since. And it worries her. What made the moment special? And why can’t they again? “And anyway—it’s just not the same. The streets. The stores. Any of it. It feels sometimes like I’m walking in a dream. Sometimes I kinda want to wake up.”

Julie pushes herself to sit up. “It’s that bad?”

“What? I mean—no! ‘Course not,” he scoffs, brushing her off with a laugh.

He’s lying through his teeth. It’s clear as day. She gently lowers herself down onto the floor beside him. She wishes she could reach out. Touch his hand. Fold her fingers through his. Comfort him in some little way. But all she can do is exist beside him because he is very much dead.

And she is very much not.

“I mean,” he goes on, “it’s not bad at all. We can go anywhere we want—a-and we don’t even have to sleep or eat. Though man do I miss a good pizza.”

“What toppings?”

“Pepperoni.”

“Good choice.”

“And olives,” he adds, and she makes a face.

“Gross, really?”

“What? Olives are great! You should try it sometime,” he adds when she goes to rebuke him, and she rolls her eyes. “Try one for me, anyway.” He then looks down at his hands, picking at his nails. “Mom would always order the pizza half pepperoni and olives, and half pepperoni. She hated olives too. _Hates_ olives,” he corrects because she isn’t dead.

It’s _he_ who’s dead. It’s his mom who had to carry his death for twenty-five years. It’s his mom who he feels he let down. He wishes he could take away her pain, bottle it up, throw it away. But it’s there forever because time keeps marching forward. Relentlessly.

There are no take-backsies.

“Fine—but if I hate it you can’t hold it against me,” she replies and holds up a pinky to pinky swear—before she realizes that they can’t, and quickly drops her hand.

He laughs, and this time it isn’t a fake one. “You still do that?”

“Pinky swears? Yeah.”

“Glad to see some things don’t change. How about Discmans?”

“What?”

He snorts a laugh. “They were portable CD players with headphones. Kinda like Walksmans, but those were tapes. Mine broke. Often. Though I had so many great albums on CD. Like Green Day and Alanis Morisette and Nirvana and—oh there was this new band that I _just_ heard of before I died—” He snaps his fingers to try to remember the name. “Nickelback! Ah man, their demo was fire.”

Julie bites the inside of her cheek to not laugh.

“I wonder whatever happened to them,” he adds earnestly.

Perhaps it’s best not to tell him, she thinks and leans her head back against the side of her bed. She can’t help but think how much she likes the way his hair curls, and how she likes the way he grins—like he wants to smile but he feels too cool to. She likes that his fingers are calloused from years plucking the strings of his guitar, and she likes the way he always seems to know when she’s feeling sad or lonely or—missing her mom.

Because he misses his, too, and he knows how it feels. He knows how to find that kind of sadness tucked into the corners of her smile, and he wishes he could help. But he never quite knows how.

Luke is like the kind of book she wants to pick off the shelf and read, but she isn’t sure if she should because she might get lost in the pages.

She wouldn’t mind getting lost, really. Just for a little while.

“Tell me about your life,” she says softly.

He gives her a strange look. “You really wanna know?”

She nods.

Though, he isn’t sure where to begin. He doesn’t know what parts to tell her, what parts to leave out. He wasn’t the best kid, that was for sure, and there were things he did that he doesn’t quite regret but . . . he wouldn’t do them again, that’s for sure. Would she look at him differently if she knew the truth? That he sometimes smoked pot, that he was never a great student, that he snuck into way too many abandoned asylums and hospitals looking for ghosts only to become one, that the only thing he was good at—the _one thing_ —was music . . .

But he can’t _not_ tell her all of those things, because they make him who he is. He wouldn’t be Luke without them—without the knicks and scars.

So he takes a deep breath (and all good stories begin with a deep breath) and tells her everything. He tells her things he hadn’t told anyone outside of the chords on his guitar. He tells her about birthdays, about Christmases, about his favorite pets. He tells her things that help him feel alive again—just a little.

Just for a breath.

And neither of them notice it, but they begin to drift toward each other, like binary stars slowly coming together. It’s a subtle shift, as Luke remembers his life before the Orpheum, before the twenty-five years in darkness, before Julie’s spark of light. He tells her about his first guitar, and getting music at the Virgin record store in town, and how he and Alex and Reggie and Bobby used to rent bad b-movies at Blockbuster and forget to rewind the tapes. He doesn’t remember when he falls asleep, or how he falls asleep—but he does.

And so does Julie. She falls asleep on his shoulder, listening to his stories and the soft cadence of his voice, and perhaps for a moment before she drifts off she thinks of how warm he feels, how good he smells—like Red Hots and sweet soda.

It’s probably a dream, and she’ll wake up on the floor beside her bed, and Luke will be gone, but it’s a nice dream. For the moment. For now.

It’s nice to sometimes feel safe, to fit so comfortably against someone else, as though you belong.


	2. papercuts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reggie is a little sad. And then he gets a papercut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone!! Thank you so much for all the comments to the last little short story! Here's another one, this time focusing on another one of our wonderful himbos. 
> 
> Happy reading!

There’s a certain kind of sadness Reginald can’t quite shake. He doesn’t know why—there’s no _reason_ to be sad. He’s still here! Still exists! That’s all that matters, right? He isn’t wherever dead people go when they die. (He was never very religious, probably his parents used church as one of the many battlegrounds. Protestant—no, Catholic! Jewish, his grandmother was Jewish. Bah! Going back to that stuffy Baptist church again, just to spite your mother.) So, all in all, it’s a win.

He gets to exist. Gets to hang out. Gets to . . .

Julie’s family hurries past him on their way out the door to one of Carlos’ soccer practices. He waves, even though they can’t see him, and after Mr. Molina shuts the door, he puts his hands into his pockets and sighs.

But man does he miss the small things.

Being seen, he has determined, is a small thing. Real small. Not really even worth a mention. Like taking showers (he really misses showers), and eating pizza, and riding bikes at the pier, and playing music with random strangers at the music store, and . . .

Everything else.

They’re small things. He’s fine.

He’s _fine_.

He keeps telling himself this day in and day out, ever since they all appeared in Julie’s mom’s old studio. He hasn’t brought up his thoughts with Luke or Alex because, well, like it really matters. They’re all feeling the same way, anyway. They’re all in the same boat.

Except . . . Alex has been gone a lot recently to visit Willie. And Luke spends more and more time with Julie, leaving him . . .

He sits down at the dining room table and smooths out the table setting. Mr. Molina’s laptop is closed at the head of the table, a stack of papers beside it. The house is so quiet it reminds him of that room they were in for twenty-five years. The one without edges, where the walls just kept going and going. And there was no door. There was no sound—not even the sound of their heartbeats.

There was nothing.

_I’m fine,_ he thinks to himself and gets up a little too quickly from the table. It’s not that quiet, and they’re not in that room anymore and—

He accidentally knocks off the papers on the edge of the table. Important papers for Mr. Molina’s work. They flutter in a flurry to the ground.

“Crap,” he mutters to himself and hurries to scoop up the pages again—

A sharp pain slices his finger.

He hisses and pulls back his fingers. Sticks them in his mouth. They taste strange. Metallic. He takes a second look at his hand.

A small red ribbon blooms on his first finger.

A papercut.

But—he doesn’t have blood. He isn’t alive. But for a moment he feels—he feels like—

The front door opens.

In his memories, it’s his parents, shouting at each other as they toss their coats off and kick off their shoes, as he tries not to wince. _You’re_ stupid. No _you’re_ stupid, they remark to each other, calling each other names over something so inconsequential, they probably don’t even remember it anymore. Then they always— _always_ —turn to Reggie and they ask him, “What do you think?”

Because they want him on their side, and he’s been pulled one way or the other so many times, stuck in the middle, unable to leave, that no matter what he says it’ll never be good enough.

But it’s not his parents—of course not. His parents moved away, their house torn down to build a bike shop. Maybe they’d finally divorced after he died. That would be nice. Some peace, finally, in their lives.

Though every time that front door opens, he still finds himself tensing with panic.

Even as Carlos comes running into the house, shouting about the epic soccer match. Even as Mr. Molina puts his car keys down on the counter.

Reggie looks back down at his finger. The line of blood is gone. He must’ve imagined it.

‘Course he did.

* * *

Reggie is curled up in the corner of the couch beside Carlos as they watch a rerun of _Adventure Time_. “I wish they had shows like this when I was alive,” he says. “All we had was _Scooby-Doo_ and anime bootlegs. Do you still have bootlegs? VHS ones?”

Carlos munches on a small pack of Doritos.

“Didn’t know what the heck they were saying but they were so cool.”

Mr. Molina knocks on the doorframe to the living room. “Hey, mijo, time for bed,” he says and jabs his thumb upstairs.

“But Dad!” Carlos whines. “We’re almost to the good part!”

“He can’t go to sleep _yet_!” Reggie adds. "The show's not done!"

Mr. Molina gives Carlos a look, and the kid sighs and jabs the off button. The TV screen goes dark. “Sorry, ghost,” he mumbles.

"Nah it's okay—wait. You're talking to me? Me?" Reggie asks, though the boy doesn't answer as he rolls up the top of his mini-bag of chips to save for tomorrow, and tucks them into the fake fruit arrangement on the coffee table. "You were. I know you were."

Carlos said we.

_We_.

Did he know—but how did he know—

Carlos sulks off up the stairs, Mr. Molina shaking his head. “Ghost,” he whispers doubtfully and follows his son up the stairs to make sure he does, in fact, go to bed. "You need to stop watching _Ghost Nation,_ mijo."

"Yeah, yeah."

Reggie sits quietly in the living room for a long moment.

_We._

Carlos knew.

He can’t help but smile a little. Because it’s a small thing. So small it shouldn’t really even matter, but _gosh darn it_ , it does. It's silly, and it doesn't change anything, but—but _doesn't_ it? Just a little? Just enough for the house to not feel so quiet. It's a little louder.

It's a little more alive.

Luke sticks his head through the front door, and when he finds Reggie on the couch, he throws his hands up and walks in through the door. “Yo, we’ve been looking for you! We were gonna have a session today but we couldn’t find you. Where’ve you been?”

“Around,” he replies. “I didn’t really feel like playing today.”

His best friend frowns. Sits down on the edge of the couch. “Anything I can do?”

He thinks for a moment, about the quiet of the house, about Carlos’s _we_ —and shakes his head. “Nah man. It’s good though, right? This is good.”

“What’s good?”

“This family. We’re a part of it—right? Kind of. A little. On the edges.”

Luke squeezes his shoulder. “Yeah. We are.” He sits there beside Reggie for a bit longer, a quiet moment between them, before he stands again and says, “Alex should be back soon. I’ll be writing in the studio if you need me, yeah?”

He smiles. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“Always.”

Luke leaves, and he sinks back into the couch because he feels safe here. He feels at home. And that was something he never felt at _home_. He always walked on eggshells then, afraid he’d say the wrong thing, side with the wrong parent. Here . . . here he just _is._ He can just exist—he can just _be._

That’s powerful.

To find a place that finally feels like home.

Even if it took dying to find it.

* * *

Ray pauses as he finishes cleaning up the kitchen. Is Carlos back downstairs again on the sofa? “I told you to go to bed, mijo—”

It isn’t Carlos, but one of Julie’s friends. One of her bandmates, actually. She didn’t tell him she had guests over, which was kind of rude. The boy is curled up on the edge of the couch, his arms crossed over his chest, asleep.

“Switzerland my ass,” he mumbles, grabbing a blanket from the back of the recliner. He shakes it out and puts it over the boy.

He could be mad at Julie for not telling him she had friends over, but truth be told, he’s just thankful that they helped her find her voice again. They helped her find _herself_ again. They helped her _be_.

And that's the kind of gift that, the older you got, the less you took for granted.

He turns off the lights in the living room. “Goodnight, kid.”

“’Night, Dad,” the kid mumbles in his sleep.

Ray snorts a laugh, shaking his head, and climbs the steps to bed.


End file.
